On a warm June morning in 1968, I set out for the Museum of Modern
Art to see Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s “L’Age D’Or”
(1928). As a student in a New York City high school with an artsy fartsy art
program I had a free pass to the museum and only had to pay a nominal fee
to see the films. There had been so much talk, talk, talk about this flick
that I was psyched to finally see it.

But it was not to be. Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated
the day before and since he was the senator from New York State, certain institutions
were closed. Perhaps it was an omen. Maybe even a curse.
For decades I chased “L’Age D’Or” from one blank screen
to another canceled showing to video stores who had promised it only to get
a sad shake of the head from some underpaid cineaste wannbe who worked the
counter and made unheeded recommendations to the great films. Some things
find you and the other day at the local branch of the New York Public Library
while thumbing through the stacks of DVDs and VHS tapes, “L’Age
D’Or” popped into my surprised hands. It was a revelation. It
was the last film that I had expected to find there although I have found
some real gems. Finally, I would see the flick that had caused so much outraged
ink to be spilled.

Pauline Kael, the film critic for The New Yorker, described
the film as “the most scandalous of all Bunuel’s films. Surreal,
dreamlike and deliberately, pornographically blasphemous.” George Orwell
in an author’s note to an essay in As I Please 1943-1945 states,
“according to Taxi Gatwick London Henry Miller’s account of it, it showed among other
things some fairly detailed shots of a woman defecating.” An account
by Henry Miller in The Cosmological Eye mentions numerous things
but not anything close to what George Orwell said he said. Maybe Orwell relied
on a very bad translation of the French contained in the Miller essay or read
between the lines of Miller’s puritanical streak. And don’t think
for a moment that he didn’t have one. There is a scene with a toilet.
And something happens. But there is nobody in the room at the time.

After having read numerous reviews, criticisms and diatribes
about “L’Age D’Or,” it was liberating to finally see
the film at this remove and wonder what had prompted the virulent response.
I now know what Pauline Kael lost at the movies. It was her mind. There is
nothing even remotely pornographic about “L’Age D’Or”
unless a women sucking on the stone toe of a statue (a still is reproduced
above) is your idea of pornography. Even girlie postcards sold by vendors
on the bridges crossing the Seine in Paris are more pornographic than anything
in this film. There are religious figures in the film and considering that
Bunuel and Dali are both from Spain it isn’t surprising. There is no
blasphemy in the film although the church is certainly a target. It was always
a target of the surrealists. As for shots of women defecating, it’s
absolute nonsense.

Watching “L’Age D’Or” made me realize
two things. The first is that “L’Age D’Or” is without
question Bunuel’s best work. While I liked “Exterminating Angel,”
I found “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” somewhat forced
and “That Obscure Object of Desire” to be juvenile at best. Recently
I re-saw “Belle de Jour” and didn’t find the ending ambiguous
at all and it was fun but it lacked that driving sense of humor and exploration
of cinema that drove “L’Age D’Or” and to a lesser
extent “Un Chien Andalou” (which should be remembered as the film
that made “L’Age D’Or” possible).

It would be pointless to attempt to describe this film and
that is one of its strengths. If you have only read about this film then everything
you know is wrong. Yes, it has scorpions, giraffes, religious figures, violins,
a kicked blind man and numerous other surreal elements including the line,
“yes, but you have accordions.” Because of its age it is slow
in parts and some of the references are now obscure. Even so, it is hysterically
funny in a sardonic way and that is a type of humor that the market researchers
never had a clue about. It’s one of those few films that really need
to be seen to grasp what cinema is all about.

The second thing that the film made me realize was how much
I miss the Dadaists and Surrealists. Max Ernst has a small part in “L’Age
D’Or” and so I spent some time on the search engines running down
Max, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Rene Magritte, Jean Cocteau (I’m keeping
an eye out for “Blood of the Poet”) and others and even Salvador
Dali. It always struck me as funny that the Surrealists were so organized
as to have a criteria for who could be in the club. They actually threw Antonin
Artaud out of the Surrealist movement. How do you throw out Artaud and keep
Dali? Dali has always been a problematic figure. Part genius, part huckster
whore he’s the father to the bastard son who became Andy Warhol. Orwell
described him as a technical master with a diseased mind or words to that
effect and it’s a hard description to argue with. Orwell hated “Rainy
Taxi” but I loved it when I saw it at the Dada and Surrealism show at
MOMA but even so while Dali’s technical mastery is to be appreciated
he has somehow managed to devalue everything he touches. Dali co-wrote “Un
Chien Andalou” and “L’Age D’Or” but there is
no question that these are Bunuel’s films.

If surrealism
is your cup of fur, check out this site
and its archive.
Nice that they gave a nod to Alfred Jarry.

Spending time with that bunch and being reminded of why I
had such a desire to see “L’Age D’Or” and other films
and work of that time forced me to the inevitable conclusion that with the
exception of some of the so-called action painters and a few scattered individuals,
artists fail to hold my attention or admiration anymore. Remember when artists
mattered and did work that illuminated instead of the over-wrought or conceptualized
nonsense that passes these days for art in the corporate sponsored galleries?
And while watching the Bunuel film it became all too clear that the people
that Bunuel ridiculed were exactly the people that young American artists
now want to become. Take “L’Age D’Or” and reshoot
it in the Hamptons and it’ll never be seen by anyone anywhere. It probably
couldn’t even be made.

And that is why this film is important. Not as some interesting historical
footnote, not as a benchmark of the cinema but as a document that remains
of the time when artists weren’t dime a dozen plasticene wet-dream cast-offs
squeezed out of a university degree-granting tube into a pre-fab reality such
as Williamsburg to suckle at the corporate teat if only they can get their
lips close enough.

Some films measure how far we’ve come and some measure
how much we’ve lost.